Well … I’ve been living it up (?) as a graduate teaching assistant for a course in mathematics for computer science, taken mostly by second-year undergrads, with a total enrollment of around ~180. As part of my duties, I get to teach two sections that meet twice a week and also contribute to writing problems for assignments and quizzes. What fun!

Actually, the making-up-awesome-problems part really is fun! I managed to whip together an entire problem set on the topic of sums and asymptotic relations in which all the problems are Hello! Project-themed.

Alas, after discussion with the other staff members, we decided that while the problems were awesome and hilarious (maybe more so for me than for them), they were a bit on the challenging side, not straightforward enough, and touched on a few topics we weren’t really covering (Problem 4d in particular “would kill the students”). So it got scratched, and a more boring replacement was released instead.

But all is not lost! We’ve decided to release this problem set as optional, not-for-credit “challenge problems”, and you can try them out here:

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4 comments

Sequences and series aaarrrgghhhh…
The students have to write programs to determine these answers, right?
But the subset group names are pure gold. So is the accurate portrayal of harmonic’s crazy cousin.

Nah, no programs needed … this course is on mathematical techniques that are useful for computer scientists … an introduction to proofs, graph theory, number theory, sums, approximations, counting, probability, recurrences, etc. The only prereq is single-variable calculus. That said, programming experience would probably be useful, as it involves much of the same analytical thinking needed to tackle the course topics….

And thanks. :-D Maybe I’ll get to TA intro algorithms in the spring, and we could see some more H!P-related problems then… Heapsort! Red-black trees! Dijkstra’s shortest-path algorithm! Amortized analysis! Mwahahhahaaaaa….

I am applying to be a TA in Course 6 in the spring, yes. I listed my top choices as 6.006, 6.046, and 6.042. I’m also inquiring about possibly being a TA for 24.900. I heard they had a shortage this term… :)